ATI X1000 "AVE" link...

[Dr Mordrid]

What's AVE? The Avivo Video Encoder, a new name for the XCODE betaware.

Here's the deal: get one of the new ATI X1000 based cards (including the AIW) and you can use the Avivo XCODE package, now called the Avivo Video Encoder. AVE feeds media encodes thorugh the X1000 GPU's programmable pixel shaders for up to 5x faster encoding depending on the target format.

So far the encoding options are VERY limited and the tool has more development to be done, but so far it's pretty darned impressive. Supported formats so far;

MPEG 1
MPEG 2
MPEG 4 (DivX, Generic, Sony PSP)
WMV
H.264 (AVI, Generic, Sony PSP)

This site has a download link for it;

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1281

Early tests;

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/video/avivo_1.html

To be sure there's work to be done, but not a bad start...

[schmosef]

That's really interesting Doc.

Any word on the encoder quality and the actual speed increase?

[Sciascia]

I saw this a few weeks ago. Currently you don't need to have the new video card to make it work, I believe that someone 'patched' that part and it is pretty fast. The newer release will have the GPU involved and should be really fast. From my experience it doesn't like DV files, it crashes. Could be the DV version though, haven't really gotten into it.

It is very fast and the quality is pretty damn impressive. It just isn't very configurable, you basically have like 10 profiles and formats to choose from and then a quality slider.

[schmosef]

Well the idea of GPU accelerated encoding sounds very promising.

[Dr Mordrid]

That's really interesting Doc.

Any word on the encoder quality and the actual speed increase?

Check the 2nd link in my original post. The quality is good, but could still use some work and more settings. Nevertheless it's one helluva start.

Dr. Mordrid

[Marshmallowman]

Defintely good for ATI owners

But a few little details, you get proper hardware decodeing with cat 5.13 and the cyberllink decoder.

However that encoding app is fully software encoding, they have not got the hardware part up and running *yet*, as it does a pretty good conversion rate as is it should really fly once the hardware starts working.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2645&p=3